Changing of the guard

During the years I've been a clergy, seminaries have faced serious changes in their student bodies.

When I went to seminary in the late 1950s, we were almost all young men straight from college with no work experience of any length in the secular world. We followed a generation of World War II veterans and of conscientious objectors (and some not so "conscientious" but who chose ministry to avoid the draft). We had a few women who tended to be training for the mission field or for Christian Education.

Within ten years, the seminaries began to see the age of their students growing precipitously as second career people, a growing number of women, sought refuge from the secular job market, where they had no control over their jobs or futures, to the ministry where they at least could work on their own without a boss breathing down their necks. They also tended to be more contemplative, more individualistic, and less inclined to be collaborative. That led to a generation of isolated clergy content to be operate on their own but more vulnerable to bad administration of the complaint process.

More recently, young women and second career women have come into the seminaries, becoming the majority group gender. In my conference in Wisconsin, the groups being ordained contain only one or two men and the rest are women. The gender of our conference is shifting. Almost makes me feel like a "spotted owl."

Will making it easier to become a pastor bring more young men as well as young women into ministry? Will that change the demographics in the seminaries? We'll see.